You may have your own favorite definition of the term, but I think most people would agree with the basics of the above description/definition of inbound marketing.

Now, I highlighted the phrase "overall 'pulling' the customer toward you" because at the end of the day, this is the ultimate goal of inbound marketing. If your goal is to "pull your customer toward you" in order to sell them something, then time is definitely of the essence.

Follow The "Lead"er

Way back in 2007, if someone used the word "pinterest" you would have thrown the flag at then for misspelling and only the cool kids had iPhones, Dave Elkington, the CEO and founder of a company called InsideSales.com, along with Ken Krogue, the president and co-founder, wanted to know the answer to a question that sales professionals had pondered since the beginning of time - Internet time that is.

What Dave and Ken wanted to know was how and more importantly, when sales pros should respond to sales leads coming directly via inbound marketing.

After discovering that no research had been done on this topic, they decided to do it themselves. They reached out to James B. Oldroyd, a visiting faculty fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

"Because so much money was migrating to Internet marketing efforts, we knew there would be significant interest around the topic of lead response rates, timing and effort, and there influence on the outcome of a lead," says Elkington.

Krogue recognized the changing tides and shifts that were occurring in the world of marketing, "quickly realizing the industry was migrating away from the old way of doing business (outbound) cold calling to the new digital marketing environment, centered around web leads."